Your final grade will be the best of the final exam and the re-exam. You may bring one A4 cheat sheet (double-sided, in your own handwriting) to the exams. Exams might be oral if there is only a small number of registered participants.

Final Exam: July 18th, 13:30 - 16:30, Günther-Hotz-Hörsaal

Re-Exam: TBA

Announcements

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Description

This course provides an introduction to fundamental concepts and algorithmic methods for solving linear and integer linear programs.

Linear optimization is a key subject in theoretical computer science. Moreover, it has many applications in practice. A lot of problems can be formulated as (integer) linear optimization problem. For example, combinatorial problems, such as shortest paths, maximum flows, maximum matchings in graphs, among others have a natural formulation as a linear (integer) optimization problem. In this course you will learn:

how to optimize a linear function subject to linear constraints

how to formulate combinatorial problems as (integer) linear optimization problems

how to solve them

To this end, basic concepts from polyhedral theory will be introduced. The simplex algorithm and the ellipsoid method will be presented. The lecture concludes with exact and approximation algorithms for NP-hard optimization problems. There will be theoretical and practical exercises.

Policies

This is a 9-credit-point core lecture ("Stammvorlesung"). There will be two lectures and one exercise session per week. We will hand out exercises every week (usually worth 40 points) and each student should score at least 50% in the first half of the course (first 6 exercise sheets) and 50% in the second half in order to be allowed to take the exam.

Lectures

The slides of all lectures condensed in a handout can be found here. The supplement containing important definitions, theorems and proofs can be found here. We also provide the supplement of last year's lecture for reference here.